If you've ever found yourself calling all over town after hours or while overseas to get an important phone number, mvision is for you. This service allows users to view a centralised list of staff and customer contact details directly from their mobile phone.

Users complained about carrying around an out of date diary, or having to phone the company receptionist to get a client’s number. “We’ve already been trialing the product with some of New Zealand’s largest companies, and the feedback is that mvision has saved a lot of calls to the company receptionist in order to get hold of other staff”, says mvision Director Mac Jones.

Mvision uses WAP, “mainly because there are so many WAP phones out there now”. “Most people that have a WAP phone, may not know that it can do other things. WAP got a bit of a bad rap in the dot com boom. People were told they'd be surfing the web from their phones and it just didn't turn out that way”. WAP is one of the technologies behind most of the portals deployed by mobile operators, like Vodafone live!, T-Mobile Zones or O2 Active. Actually, the Mobile Data Association (UK) reported more than 1.1 billion WAP pages served in June 2004 alone.

Mvision estimates there are more than 800,000 WAP capable phones in New Zealand. WAP users are usually charged only for the information used (when connected via GPRS), making it a relatively low cost mobile feature.

With mvision, users simply enter their contacts, either manually in a web page, or by uploading an Excel spreadsheet. To access their contacts users simply click on the mvision bookmark on their WAP and enter part of a name, or even just the person’s initials. One more click and users can dial their contact’s number immediately.

“We've kept the number of clicks and typing to an absolute minimum - people just want the information, so the less typing the better.”

The mvision mobile access product should hit the New Zealand market this week. The company is working on mvision Outlook, which allows users to have Microsoft Outlook calendar, tasks and contacts automatically available on a mobile phone.